Well, if the root cause is falling populations in villages as populations move to cities, and assuming that consolidation won’t work because people won’t travel to the next village or move there, you could maybe do mobile bistros. Like, have one van that serves two locations, each on half the days. It means that people can’t go every day, but if it means that a bistro gets more patrons per day, that might work for the bistro, and it might be adequate for the patrons.

Mobile clinics and bookmobiles have been similar ways to successfully provide services in low population areas.

At a certain threshold, if people are just retirees living in a village out of inertia rather than because they need to work in an area (as opposed to e.g. farmers), it might be practical to look into more actively-managing decline, shifting populations of depopulating villages en masse into metro areas, or at least consolidating villages. Always going to have more ability to provide services that way, and if one can do a coordinated move, it might let communities remain more intact.

EDIT: One other point, drawing a parallel with the political situation over here in the US. I think that rural depopulation is, depending upon where one is, potentially something that has national implications. Like, under current US party alignment, the Democratic Party is essentially the party of the urban areas, and the Republican Party the party of the rural areas. Some MAGA concerns in the US deal with the fact that people are not happy about depopulation of rural areas. Some political science author I was reading recently wrote something like “There are two Americas. Things are booming in urban America, but they haven’t been going especially well in rural America for decades.” A lot of how Trump got the support that he wanted was in appealing to unhappy rural voters, saying that he was going to do things like bring back assembly-line labor in factories. When he didn’t do it, voters kind of lost faith this term, and his approval plunged.

https://www.brookings.edu/articles/president-trumps-support-declines-sharply-in-rural-america/

The breakdown by issue suggests that the economy lies at the heart of rural Americans’ retreat from the president. Only 24% of white rural voters think that the condition of the economy is excellent or good, while 77% rate it as fair or poor. Just 16% say their family’s financial situation is better than it was two years ago (near the end of the Biden administration), compared to 49% who say they are worse off. Sixty-four percent of white rural voters think that the cost of living is the most important economic problem they face, and only 30% approve of Trump’s handling of this issue. By a margin of 49% to 39%, they have concluded that his policies will hurt the country in the long run.

These sentiments are grounded in real experiences in rural communities. In 2025, according to the American Farm Bureau, farm bankruptcies rose by 46%, a figure to which the president’s policies contributed significantly. His tariffs reduced demand for U.S. agricultural products, especially soybeans, while increasing the cost of key inputs such as farm equipment and fertilizer. His immigration crackdown made it harder for ranchers, farmers, and milk producers to find the workers they needed. The war with Iran sent the price of gasoline and diesel fuel soaring. Last year alone, 15,000 farms closed, and the pace of bankruptcies has accelerated to 70% so far this year.

The rural economy is more than agriculture, of course. Many small rural towns depend on a single small manufacturing plant, and the news has not been good. While President Trump promised that his tariffs would jumpstart a manufacturing revival, the number of U.S. manufacturing jobs has declined by 77,000 since the beginning of his second term.

These trends are not entirely new, of course. Manufacturing has struggled to reverse the massive employment losses the sector experienced between 2001 and 2010, and the squeeze on agricultural producers has lasted for most of the past 15 years. Since 2011, the prices farmers must pay to produce their crops have increased by 50% while the prices they receive for them have fallen by 4%. But rural Americans expected change for the better under Trump, and they have not experienced it.

Urbanization is a worldwide affair, and so that kind of political experience is, I’d imagine, similar in many places. You figure that politicians can probably appeal to rural residents people unhappy about urbanization and the depopulation of the areas where they live.

I don’t know what the right answer is, because I don’t think that the things that the MAGA crowd wants are generally very reasonable solutions—like, the US is not going to roll back to the 1950s, as the world economic environment has changed. But I do think that it’s worth keeping in mind that rural depopulation does create real problems for people in rural areas, and it might be worth maybe looking at alternate ways of handling rural depopulation than it has been handled in some places, if one doesn’t want to wind up with a bunch of unhappy people and the political effects from that.

The reason why rural communities even exist is because transport used to be expensive. If you wanted to grow food, you had to live physically close to the food, so a whole lot of small settlements developed throughout the country.

That was before 1900 when industrial machines became available. Nowadays, you can easily farm a huge area while living 300 km away for most of the year.